How to standardize signatures in your business emails – a step-by-step guide

If you are reading this, I guess you are already well aware of how important it is to have a corporate signature inserted into your business emails. That’s great, but does the rest of your co-workers realize that, too? You can use your online correspondence as a platform to promote and spread your company’s values. However, it will not be effective if all employees create email signatures on their own. How to solve that, then? All you need is an official, standardized template for the signatures coming from all your company’s mailboxes. In this article, I will guide you through an easy email signatures standardization process.

Unify

Your image is your selling point, so it is crucial to include it in every outgoing email. Create an original, yet consistent portrait that you’d like to present yourself with. How?

Delegate the job and put one person in charge of all the signatures.

Get rid of illegible or childish fonts, philosophical quotes, and family pictures from all employees’ messages.

Make sure the signatures are not too long but include all required information.

Spend some time analyzing the relevance of every single item inserted in them.

Customize

As the signatures are your employees’ electronic business cards, you have to adjust the included information to your users. It will be a sign that your company is well organized and professionally managed. Personalize your corporate signatures according to the senders’ position, department, and scope of recipients of their messages. For example:

IT staff members’ signature should include internal contact information and only the basic info. There is no need for disclaimers in the case of internal communication. Sales team signature should include extended company details, corporate logo, marketing banners, social media icons, and a disclaimer.

Use visuals

Eye-catching properties of well-designed graphics are not a secret, use them in your favor.

Add your company’s logo to all signatures.

Make sure the logo is well-exposed and hyperlinked. This way, you are directing email recipients to your company’s website handily.

Include users’ portraits in your messages. They are proved to be trust-winning, making the online communication more friendly and humanized.

Insert links

When working on your clientele gain, do not forget to use hyperlinks.

Include the links to your most valuable online resources into your signature. Increased traffic on your webpage or a blog for instance, can significantly benefit your sales polls.

Find a spot for your social network icons.

Add a disclaimer

Providing detailed information about your company is often required by law. Other than that, well-written disclaimers protect your confidentiality and assert company’s safety in many cases. Including them also generates a transparent, trustworthy corporate image to your clients. Read more on that topic.

Include disclaimers at the bottom of all your externally directed messages.

Don’t make mistakes

Do you know how important first impressions are? That is why you should not allow yourself to make any mistakes.

Think of signatures as of marketing opportunities

Because most B2B communication is based on emails, email signatures can be a part of the most effective marketing campaigns. Keep that in mind while designing each template.

Make sure the information included in your signature, as well as its design, are up to date.

Prepare scheduled strategy for all your company external messages.

The process of email standardization, just like any other, will become what you make of it, and it does not have to be frustrating at all. Take a look at available methods of standardizing email signatures.

Email Client solutions

It is incredibly hard to have standardized email signatures inserted in all your company’s employees emails when they are not centrally managed. The process will require you to:

Enforce the signature implementation across all individuals in your company.

Limitations of various Email Clients solution

The greatest problem with this method is that you either have to count on the employees to set their email signature right, with the template you provide or set the signature manually for them. See how difficult the signature deployment might be. On top of all that come the restrictions of particular email clients. For instance, signature design capabilities are often narrowed down to pre-fixed items. Finally, without access to HTML source code, it is hard to finely-tune the signature so that it is displayed well on every recipient’s screen.

*In case your company end-users use more than one email client, you will have to prepare the signature design for each of them.

Centrally managed signatures solution

Exchange Server and Office 365 allow you to centrally manage and deploy decent signatures for any scope of mailboxes in your company. In order to include signatures in your end users’ messages, you have to:

Limitations of native Microsoft solutions

In this case, email signature central standardization is possible but crippled by some limitations. Neither Exchange Server, nor Exchange Online distinguishes single emails within a conversation thread, placing all signatures at the bottom of a message chain. None of them also supports the embedded, inline images. Furthermore, signatures are not visible in users’ Sent Items folder. It makes all your corporate emails incompliant with some legal requirements for business. The hardest obstacle still is an expertise in writing HTML code needed to deploy professional and adaptable signatures. Those limitations may stand in your way to achieving effective and powerful email signatures.

CodeTwo Solutions

This software enables central signature management for multiple email clients, regardless of their hosting platform. The software allows you to deploy footers to messages from within an intuitive editor, no HTML knowledge is required. The program’s unique functionalities were created based on over ten years of CodeTwo’s experience in providing clients with email signatures solutions. Choosing CodeTwo solutions lets you:

Create a unified email signature across your company for Microsoft Outlook, G Suite mail, OWA app for iOS and OWA for Office 365 at the same time.

Include users’ data from the Active Directory database in a customized and smart fashion with Active Directory attributes picker at hand and Auto-removal of vacant repository fields.

Create signatures with an easy-to-use and convenient template Editor. It enables you to add text, links, graphics and photos from one place.

Add marketing content and track its performance.

Display signatures to end users in their message creation process and the Sent Items folder. It provides them with the comfort of seeing the final message format.

CodeTwo has pioneered the email signature management field, providing users with irreplaceable software for an administrative signature management. Depending on the platform you’re using, you can always find something suited to your needs.

CodeTwo Email Signatures for Office 365 and CodeTwo Exchange Rules

CodeTwo Email Signatures for Office 365 is an administrative tool enhancing your ability to manage email signatures and disclaimers within Exchange Online. Using it, you will gain full control over your signatures content.

CodeTwo Exchange Rules is a signature manager designed to help you set up professional email signatures to all your mailbox users in on-premises Microsoft Exchange. Similarly to CodeTwo Email Signatures for Office 365, this software provides you with some useful and long-awaited features. Some of them being:

Signatures can be displayed in the end-users Sent Items folder, assuring them of the messages’ final look. It will also prove that all the required information about the company and the disclaimer have been included.

An intuitive HTML Signature Editor to create all your signature templates without the expertise in code writing.

The ability to insert images and logos as inline attachments. The recipients will have them displayed automatically without the necessity to download or open images externally. Thanks to that, you can insert visual content into the footers, including banners, users’ photos or call-to-action buttons.

Rules Scheduler which enables you to set up the exact dates when you want your signature rules to be applied. The software does it automatically on the provided date.

Management delegation feature which allows you to delegate signatures design and configuration e.g. to the marketing team. It will save IT staff members some time and trouble.

The possibility to implement users’ data with placeholders pulling information out of your Active Directory. Additionally, the software supports inserting custom AD attributes and auto-removal of empty fields, along with signaling phrases.

The bottom line

Everything that was out of reach with native email signature tools is now possible with CodeTwo software. The centralized email signature solutions will assist you in creating outstanding signatures for your organization. This will boost your marketing campaigns and help with your brand building with every outgoing message.